Metallica's Orion Music + More revs up Atlantic City

Saed Hindash/The Star-LedgerMetallica frontman James Hetfield stops to admire a vintage motorbike at Orion Music + More

Oliver Ackermann pitched his electric guitar across the festival stage. The frontman of the psychedelic rock band A Place to Bury Strangers looked impassive as he did, like a kid casually tossing a paper airplane in a cafeteria. A few songs later, he stuck his vocal microphone against his speaker cabinet to generate maximum feedback, and tipped over both monitors to bathe the crowd at Bader Field in Atlantic City with noise.

For Ackermann, who has a sideline selling homemade effects pedals under the name Death by Audio, assaultive sound equals smart strategy. His is aggression without malice. The same could be said for just about everything else at Orion Music + More, Sunday, right down to the flock of seagulls that arrived at 7 p.m. to pick over the scraps dropped from concession stands.

Metallica, which co-curated the two-day festival, closed both nights with sets that reaffirmed the band’s power and musicianship, as well as its firm hand with a morbid metaphor. Before snarling from the gigantic Orion main stage, the four band members established their amiability: They were everywhere, posing for pictures, greeting fans and happily introducing performers on the undercard.

Metallica also provided plenty of distractions, for themselves as well as the crowd. Bassist Robert Trujillo took to the Atlantic City waves for a morning surf and rode a half-pipe in the middle of the festival grounds on his skateboard. Drummer Lars Ulrich appeared at a screening of "Mission to Lars," a documentary film about a disabled fan of the band. Lead guitarist Kirk Hammett indulged his taste for cheesy horror films by presiding over a haunted house stocked with movie props and posters from his personal collection. And frontman James Hetfield, a motor enthusiast, hopped into the cockpit of a blue roadster at the car show he’d assembled; blasts from his engine were as loud as any from the bands.

Everything at Orion had a threatening name. The midday surfing show was dubbed the Seek and Destroy Atlantic City Air Assault. The metal groups were herded over to the Damage, Inc. stage. Even the memorabilia flea market near the festival gate borrowed its handle from Ktulu, the titanic undersea beast that haunts the weird fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. (These were all references to old Metallica songs, drawn from a catalog of material steeped in the occult, monster movies and Hetfield’s own grim imagination.)

Yet there is a limit to how firmly horror can take hold on a balmy weekend at the Jersey Shore, and the high sun and the cooling breeze off the Absecon Inlet made many of these gestures feel like little more than heavy metal formalities.

Ghost, a Swedish metal band with a weakness for ’80s arena-pop choruses, took the main stage masked. The frontman wore skull makeup and a habit festooned with inverted crucifixes and sang about the Antichrist, witchcraft and all-purpose evildoing. What might have been frightening in a dark club was rendered, by sunlight, reminiscent of after-school trick or treating.

Over at a smaller stage, Ghost was handily getting outrocked by the ferocious, droning psychedelic rock band the Black Angels. Yet given the glorious conditions, the Austin combo was unable to use its mind-altering light show effectively. A Place to Bury Strangers had a similar problem, but the trio made up for it with sheer sonic audacity.

As for the headliners, they shrewdly presented themselves not as agents of destruction, but as Everyman entertainers with typical masculine interests: cars, booze, tattoos, horror movies, skateboards.

For its sets — which had the benefit of a cover of darkness — Metallica fell back on a classic rock trope, devoting each show to a popular album. Saturday night’s concert aired the material from "Ride the Lightning," the seminal 1984 effort that wrote the rules of thrash. Sunday featured "Metallica," aka the Black Album, the 1991 set that slowed the tempos and softened the touch just enough to win Metallica a mass worldwide audience. The Black Album was performed backward; starting with "Enter Sandman" would have been accurate, but anticlimactic.

These albums were career landmarks as well as artistic ones. "Lightning" announced that Metallica wouldn’t fade into the demonic ether with the rest of the group’s headbanging peers. The Black Album institutionalized the group and insured that no matter what Metallica did afterward, it would almost certainly do it in an arena or stadium. The Black Album converted Hetfield and company from sinister guys with an interest in evil that did not seem merely anthropological to "cool dad" rock stars who race cars and surf in the afternoon and blast out "Master of Puppets" when the sun goes down.

If Metallica’s Sunday night performance was short on the transcendent fear that good metal used to generate effortlessly, the band’s skill is beyond question. Ulrich, in particular, had a sensational evening, hammering out the frantic snare beats on "Fuel" and the cymbal-crashing stomp of power ballad "Nothing Else Matters" with equal sure-footedness. (The drum sound at Orion was unusually good for an outdoor festival.) Hetfield told the crowd he was in a very good mood, and played that way, joining Hammett for harmony leads and scraping broken chords out of the belly of his guitar.

Metallica provided a fine example for the other Orion artists, most of whom had marveled at "Ride the Lightning" on Saturday night and were determined to prove that heavy metal had no exclusive purchase on aggression. Guests in Metallica’s house, they decided to dress as black as possible. Danish metal band Volbeat, known for kicking Johnny Cash songs until they bleed, gave way to beer-swigging country rocker Eric Church, who namechecked Cash twice in his first two songs. Bluesman Gary Clark Jr. beat the psychedelicists at their own game. Under the hot sun, his guitar became a whip and he lashed an expectant crowd with his tone. New Jersey’s own Titus Andronicus turned the aggression inward, leading a crowd of penitents through a procession of self-flagellating singalong choruses. Church responded across the festival site with a more traditional attitude, bragging about his incorrigibility in song, and shrugging as he pointed out that women love him for it anyway.

Orion Music + More is the third destination event to be held at Bader Field in a calendar year. The first, the Dave Matthews Band Caravan, established the venue as an ideal site for outdoor music, and much of Orion was patterned on the Caravan.

Orion was not burdened by the sanctimony that slightly soured the Matthews experience. But should Orion return to Atlantic City next year — and Metallica suggests it will — there is one major problem that organizers must address. The entire area in front of the main stage required a special wristband for entry. That was fine when Metallica played, but other performers found themselves facing a moat, their most dedicated fans arrayed along a barricade yards away from the action.

A band like Best Coast would have had a tough time connecting with a metal crowd under optimum conditions, and Metallica had to know that. Hetfield should have stepped out of that car, intervened and allowed average ticket-holders to approach the stage.